The Philosopher Justice

  Where to start? What keeps philosophers up at night worrying?  I can assure you it isn’t meta-ethics, which I will discuss after I’ve  introduced the real villain in this story.  What keeps philosophers up at night is something called “ethical naturalism”.  That’s the notion that there can be a science of morality, a way of explaining what morality does that is non-subjective and avoids the notions of moral freedom, responsibility, and purpose. Historically, past forms of ethical naturalism have morphed into Eugenics and Social Darwinism, practices which, in their crudest forms have led to the death camps. So, yes, it has kept me up at night.  But don’t worry, because there is a philosophical antidote to this horrible disease!  It is called “meta-ethics”; and, although I heartily agree that it does help me to get a good night’s rest, I think it actually makes it harder for all of us to understand how ethics works, and it almost seems as if it is desi...

  When humans first domesticated plants and animals they overrode natural selection in order to favour certain physical and behavioural features over others. Most domesticates don’t do well in the absence of humans, because the characteristics that were selected by humans, such as tameness and docility, are not advantageous in the natural world. It’s fair to say that at least a part of their nature is determined by human choice and not natural selection.  Analogously, most humans wouldn’t survive in a natural environment without other humans to cooperate with.  A mountain lion or a bear doesn’t need to be around others of their species to survive, and they are not socializers, except when it comes to mating time.  Humans are a social species but a social species that is unlike any other.  Just as we’ve prospered by selecting and maintaining certain advantageous features in domesticated plants and animals,  we prospered even more by collectively selecting ...

    A thing like a global pandemic brings out both the best and the worst in us.  The best, as we increase cooperative ventures, pitching in, volunteering, solving problems on the run, in order to  save lives and keep essential services going.  The worst, as individuals retreat within themselves, and create an echo chamber for their own fears and prejudices, both falling prey to, and actively participating in the spread of disinformation on the internet. The issue I want to focus on is the anti-vaccine movement.  One of the largest components of this movement is made up of young men, age 20 -40, which suggests a group of people who are in good health, feel somewhat invulnerable, and don’t yet feel the full responsibility of raising a family.  They claim that they are motivated by freedom - they wish to be free to act however they want, without being told what they can and cannot do.  This is also a perennial adolescent theme, a theme that ori...

 Coming soon: a discussion on the idea of freedom.  In the meantime here is an excellent source for ideas in this debate: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwIntroIndex.htm  

  Logical Atomism  was an early twentieth century philosophical movement championed by Bertrand Russell. It was based on an analogy between atoms and mathematical axioms. It  was inspired, both by the resounding success of the science of physics, and at the prospect of the  merging of logic and mathematics, also championed by Russell, that seemed imminent at the turn of the last century. Just as physical matter is ultimately  made up of combinations of atoms, concepts were envisioned to be made up of combinations of primitive atoms of meaning, like axioms in a deductive system.  The idea was that meaning has some kind of logical structure analogous to physical structure;  and the belief was that some future science could determine the laws governing this “conceptual” structure, just as physics shows us the physical laws that govern the universe.   One hundred years after the heyday of Logical Atomism, how has that atomic analogy fared? Indeed...

 https://theelectricagora.com/2021/04/28/will-a-i-be-the-death-of-us/

Why do popular philosophical theories of truth deliberately deflate truth’s value? They argue that there is no difference in saying,  ” It is true that Trump colluded with the Russians."   and,  "Trump colluded with the Russians."  They argue that the concept "truth"  seems to be redundant, because it isn't saying  more than what the statement says without it.    The deflationists want us to believe that there is nothing much to "truth",  that it doesn't add anything to our assertions unless we are generalizing about multiple statements, as in "What Mueller said was true."  If truth is nothing more than a logical connective, why do people everywhere feel so passionate about it?  Why is it so important that we get to hear what’s really in the Mueller report? Why do we want to know what really happened during the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign?   Doesn’t knowing what really happened, or who a person really is, matter c...